About the Department

The department of biomedical engineering started in the year 2012 with an intake of 60 students. The department, by now, has a total of 8 faculty members. The department has a total strength of 97 students, from diverse economic strata, willing to deliver their best, for the welfare of the society. The department has well-equipped, state-of-the-art laboratories including the biomedical instrumentation lab, microbiology and biochemistry lab, diagnostic and therapeutic lab, to meet the requirements of Anna University to the fullest and to enable the students and the scholars to pursue research in-house. Well equipped class rooms, seminar hall, staff rooms are added credentials to the department that facilitates hassle-free rendering of lectures, conducting group discussions, seminars and guest lectures, for the benefit of the student community. The department has a MOU with Dhanalakshmi Srinivasan Medical College, Siruvachur to enable the students to get a practical exposure in medical equipments.

A few strengths to highlight about the department include industry-institute interactions,, faculty interaction with the outside world, 24*7 clinic and a lot more to add to the extensive list. The department has healthy interactions with Aries Biomed, Maruti Hospital, Trichy, and many more, where the industry and hospital experts are invited to deliver lectures, conduct sponsored workshops, pursue consultation work, hardware and software testing and training, and for other diverse activities to help the student community in gaining a comprehensive understanding of the core industries and their applications.

Diverse activities including the students and faculty have always strengthened the department in various aspects. Faculty are actively involved in teaching and research, delivering lectures with content beyond syllabus, and offering projects to equip the students in having a world-class exposure to the field of biomedicine. Student workshops are conducted frequently to help the student in gaining hands-on-training in hardware and software design.

Students have achieved a great deal with their innovative thoughts, ideas, proposals, protocols and equipments. Mr. Vinoth Kumar, Shivaji , Mohd.Sirajudeen and Mr. Karthik, received the First prize, in Paper Presentations conducted in different colleges in TamilNadu.

The department is aiming to achieve attainable targets, including identifying novel areas of biomedical research, receiving more grant proposals, added publications in journals and conferences, increasing the number of internal and external industrial collaborations, strengthening the department and helping the students in pursuing a successful career in the biomedical discipline

What are all the works done by Biomedical Engineers

• Artificial organs (hearing aids, cardiac pacemakers, artificial kidneys and hearts, blood oxygenates, synthetic blood vessels, joints, arms, and legs)
• Automated patient monitoring (during surgery or in intensive care, healthy persons in unusual environments, such as astronauts in space or underwater divers at great depth)
• Blood chemistry sensors (potassium, sodium, O2, CO2, and pH)
• Advanced therapeutic and surgical devices (laser system for eye surgery, automated delivery of insulin, etc.)
• Application of expert systems and artificial intelligence to clinical decision-making (computer-based systems for diagnosing diseases).
• Design of optimal clinical laboratories (computerized analyzer for blood samples, cardiac catheterization laboratory, etc.)
• Medical imaging systems (ultrasound, computer assisted tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography, single photon emission computed tomography etc.)
• Computer modeling of physiologic systems (blood pressure control, renal function, visual and auditory nervous circuits, etc.)
• Biomaterials design (mechanical, transport and biocompatibility properties of implantable artificial materials)
• Biomechanics of injury and wound healing (gait analysis, application of growth factors, etc.)
• Sports medicine (rehabilitation, external support devices, etc.)

What are all the Educational Needs for Biomedical Engineering?

The future of Biomedical Engineering holds great promise for future generations. A solid foundation in engineering is essential, even for students looking to enter medically dominated areas. Biomedical Engineers have unique skills. Often they are needed to bridge traditional engineering skill with medical applications. Biomedical Engineers may be called upon in a wide range of capacities: to design instruments, devices, and software, to bring together knowledge from many technical sources to develop new procedures, or to conduct research needed to solve clinical problems. Biomedical Engineering will attract student’s interest in pursuing a career in medicine, biotechnology, patent law or biomedical product sales and services.

Institution Focus

Major research work of Biomedical Engineering institute will be the focus on physician-driven healthcare problems. The close relationship developed between Information Technology and medical school should make some of the traditional barriers (to collaborate) transparent. The planning and policy board of Biomedical Engineering institute must include medical school faculties and representative of industry, and it also plays an important role in helping Biomedical Engineering faculty members effectively collaborate with industries and medical school. The planning and policy board must be responsible for the framing the syllabus for the technical universities. The faculty members are expected to carry out research in their own field involving the students as their toolbox. This gives the healthcare industrial exposure to students. This collaboration enables conceptual development from institution side and applications in industry focusing towards healthcare problem.

The present curriculum of Biomedical Engineering in India includes basics of Anatomy & Physiology, Biochemistry, Pathology & Microbiology, Electronics, Instrumentation, Signal & Image Processing, Computer Languages and Information Technology along with practical classes. In addition to the above, the students are expected to undergo hospital visit, in-plant training and real-time projects. In this field, there is continual change and creation of new areas due to rapid advancement in technology; however, some of the well established specialty areas within the field of Biomedical Engineering are: Bioinstrumentation; Biomaterials; Biomechanics; Cellular, tissue and Genetic Engineering; Clinical Engineering; Medical Imaging; Orthopedic Surgery; Rehabilitation Engineering; and Systems Physiology. Conducting research at this interface of computational Biomedical Engineering, prognostics and diagnostics that combine clinical data with patient specific genotyping and molecular profiling have the potential to produce significantly improved choice of therapies for individual patients.

Industry Prospective

A revolution in disease diagnosis began in the 1970s with the introduction of Computerized Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Ultrasonic Imaging. The biomedical field also has been responsible for the development of new therapeutic devices such as the Cochlear implant, life-saving implantable Defibrillators, Pacemakers, Vascular Stent technology etc., has made it possible for minimally invasive procedures to replace major surgery and many more developments.

Cell and Tissue Engineering also has emerging as a clinical reality. Products for skin replacement are in clinical use and progress has been made in developing technologies for repair of Cartilage, Bone, Heart, Lungs, Liver, Kidney, Skeletal muscle, Blood vessels, the Nervous system and Urological disorders.

Now the economy is booming, healthcare is an important issue and industry is looking to expand. It is a good, dynamic time. The medical giants like Siemens, Philips, Toshiba, GE medicals, Hitachi etc., dominate the world in the healthcare market place, which translates into an optimistic view of the future for their field. The growth and domination of the healthcare industry worldwide are strong indicators that Biomedical Engineers will be doing well in the coming years. This translates into a wealth of opportunities for graduates possessing Bioengineering skills.

Information Technology application in healthcare is changing the way medical centers and hospitals are approaching the management of clinical information that includes billing, radiographic information and clinical information. Doctors want the most up-to-date clinical information about the bedside and in the operating room. So, all leading hospitals in abroad have Biomedical Engineering department and is now started in India, and those in the field have made great contribution for the maintenance of high technology medical devices.

The material behavior inside the body is different, so we are changing the way we think about implantable device. This represents new opportunities in material design. The most visible contribution of Biomedical Engineering to current clinical practice involves instrumentation for diagnosis, therapy and rehabilitation. Biomaterial, Rehabilitation Engineering, Computer-assisted Surgery and Medical Imaging are all areas that draw on engineering, science and medical applications. One of the rapid expanding fields is the field of nuclear medicine. New imaging technologies are providing the ability to interrogate and manipulate living biological specimens dynamically to yield information at the molecular, cellular and tissue levels. Nuclear medicine has gone from an imaging and cancer treatment tool to a tool that can be used to treat such deadly diseases such as heart disease, which is one, the leading causes of death in the world.

What is the Future of Biomedical Engineering?

The future will certainly include artificial tissue growth. Currently, the only application of artificial tissue growth is artificial skin for burn victims. This artificial skin is grown, grafted on, and left as a sort of biomechanical tarp until the burn victim’s own skin grows in. Biomedical researchers are currently looking for a permanent skin replacement and are hoping to one day grow actual organs. Many people die each year while waiting for a heart transplant; so many Biomedical Engineers are looking for compact and independent of external power artificial heart that will fit in a person’s chest. In the next 25 years, advances in electronic, optics, materials and miniaturization will push development of more sophisticated devices for diagnosis and therapy such as imaging and virtual surgery.

The Biomedical Engineering is undergoing a major ideological change. The fusion of engineering with molecular cell biology is pushing the evolution of a new engineering discipline termed Bioengineering to tackle the challenges of molecular and genomic medicine. In much the same way that the iron lung (an engineering device) was rendered obsolete by the polio vaccine (molecular medicine), many of the device-based and instrumentation-based therapies in clinical use today will likely be replaced by molecular and cellular-based therapies during the next 20 years.

The new field of Bioengineering will give rise to a new era of “lab on a chip” diagnosis, enabling molecular-level information into complex models. The result will be a revolution in diagnosis and treatment of diseases either by looking for single-signature molecule or by using appropriate algorithms to derive relationships between many interacting molecules; early prediction of onset of disease may be possible.

The entire basic medical research now slowly translates to nano-medicine. Nano is one-billionth (109) part a nanometer. Several hundreds of nano-computers are fit inside the space of a biological cell. These medical nanites could patrol the body, and armed with knowledge of DNA, repel any foreign invaders by forming an artificial immune system. There would be no pain, no bruises, and the results would be overnight. Recent progress in micro-electromechanical systems – the microelectronics, micro-fabrication and micro-machining technologies known collectively as MEMS – is being applied to biomedical applications and has become a new field of research unto itself, known as Bio-MEMS. MEMS is the technology of the very small, and merge at the nanoscale into nano-electromechanical systems and nano-technology. The technology is originally based upon the same technology that has been used to make computer chips ever more powerful and less expensive.

World has moved the Information Technology from E-commerce to Communication sectors via industrial automation with integration on chip for miniaturization. Now it is serious about Biomedical Engineering as their future goal of achievements.

Programme Educational Objectives (PEOs)

• PEO 1: The graduates will have ability to strengthen basic principles of instruments.
• PEO 2: Graduates will be outstanding professionals by improving their innovative learning techniques in the field of biomedical engineering to face the global challenges.
• PEO 3: The graduate upgrades analytical skills and train to solve the equipment problems
• PEO4: Graduates will be design real time projects to carry out society needs.
• PEO 5: The graduates will have professionalethics to serve the society and to improvise education level

Programme Outcome (POs)

• PO1: Engineering Knowledge: Strong foundation in core Computer Science and Engineering, both theoretical and applied concepts
• PO2: Problem Analysis: Identify, Formulate, Ability to apply knowledge of mathematics, science and engineering to real-life problem solving and reaching validated conclusions related to computer science.
• PO3: Design/Development of solutions: Ability to analyze, design, model, and develop complex software and information management systems that meet the specified needs with appropriate consideration for the public health and Safety and the cultural societal and environmental considerations.
• PO4: Conduct Investigations of Complex problems: Ability to use research– based knowledge and study methods including analysis, design, coding implementation, testing and interpretation of data, to provide valid Conclusions.
• PO5: Modern Tool Usage: Convention of recent techniques, modern engineering and IT tools with an understanding of the limitations.
• PO6: The Engineer and Society: Apply Reasoning informed by the contextual knowledge to assess societal, health, safety, legal and cultural issues and the consequent responsibilities relevant to the Computer Science and engineering Practice.
• PO7: Environment and Sustainability: Understanding the impact of Computer Science and Engineering solutions in the societal and human context.
• PO8: Ethics: Understand and apply professional ethical responsibility
• PO9: Individual and Team Work: Ability to function effectively within teams in Software projects.
• PO10: Communication: Ability to communicate effectively, both in writing and oral makes effective presentations to provide and obtain clear instructions.
• PO11: Project Management and Finance: Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the engineering management principles and apply these to one’s own work, as a member and leader in a team, to manage projects and in multi-disciplinary environments.
• PO12: Life-Long Learning: Recognize the need for and have the preparation and ability to engage in independent and life-long learning.

Programme Specific Outcome (PSO)

• PSO1: Bio-Analysis. Apply Mathematical Analysis for human illness, to problems, thereby to interface engineering and life science.
• PSO2: Data Interpretation and Problem Solving: Make measurements on and interpret data from physiological systems and decipher the problems associated with the interaction between living and nonliving materials and systems.